Nebraska entered the weekend as the team best positioned to knock off Ohio State for the Big Ten championship. By the end of Saturday afternoon, the Cornhuskers had been exposed as pretenders to the throne.

Wisconsin spotted the visitors a two-touchdown lead after Nebraska scored less than a minute into the second quarter to go up 17-3. In the final 44 minutes, the Badgers scored 56 unanswered points before the Huskers added a garbage-time score with less than three minutes to go. The result ended up looking far more like the matchup between these two teams in the 2012 Big Ten Championship Game than last year’s tight Nebraska victory in Lincoln last year.

The first quarter looked as though everything was going against the hosts. Nebraska was imposing its will on the Badgers, forcing turnovers and scoring points. Badger tailback Melvin Gordon carried six times for 49 yards, getting dropped twice behind the line of scrimmage and fumbling once.

The heart of the game completely flipped the script on the season. Despite fumbling again, Gordon piled up 189 yards in the second quarter on 10 carries and scored his first touchdown of the contest. With each touch, Gordon gashed Nebraska over and over again.

The third quarter sealed Gordon’s place in the record books. Piling up another 170 yards after halftime, the redshirt junior from Kenosha added three more touchdowns to his total. Each carry drove Gordon closer and closer to the record books while destroying the myth of the Blackshirt defense. After a slow start, Gordon’s fourth touchdown — on a 26-yard burst to end the third quarter — put him over 400 yards on the day and past the 15-year-old record for rushing yards in a game.

To put the record into perspective, let’s compare Gordon’s feat against the previous record. When LaDainian Tomlinson set the mark at 406 yards in 1999 against a 5-6 UTEP squad, he needed 43 carries to eclipse the 400-yard mark. Had Gordon carried 43 times on Saturday, his 16.3-yard average per carry would have had him on pace for more than 700 yards rushing. He was on pace to not just break the all-division NCAA record of 465 yards but rather to obliterate it — .even had he merely carried eight or nine more times in the final quarter, Gordon was on pace for a 544-yard day.

The win put Wisconsin atop the Big Ten West with two games left to play. More importantly, the 35-point win vaulted the Badgers into the top five of adjusted margin of victory. Their rise up the charts now gives the Big Ten two teams in the top five, setting up a potential play-in game between the Badgers and Ohio State on the first weekend of December. Given the dearth of undefeated teams and the continued fall of one-loss teams, a two-loss team like Wisconsin is far from eliminated.

Here are some other quick thoughts after sifting through the FBS Top 128 data through Week 12:

Only five teams average two touchdowns or more per game in adjusted margin of victory — Baylor, Marshall, Ohio State, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Most impressive among that list has to be the Thundering Herd, who are credited with only 50-60 percent of their winning margins based on the formula. The Herd are one of just two unbeaten teams remaining, and they’ve shown a propensity for dominance that has been sorely lacking from defending national champion Florida State this season. Marshall, however, is not getting the respect their results might deserve as pollsters and selectors look solely at strength of schedule; Doc Holliday’s team is ranked 18th in the freshly released AP and coaches polls, and could still be shut out yet again from the CFP committee’s top 25 when it is released on Tuesday.

If the four-team CFP bracket was determined by adjusted margin of victory, Baylor would be facing Georgia in the Sugar Bowl while Ohio State is still matched up for the third straight week against Marshall. Despite losses to South Carolina and Florida, the Bulldogs are now situated above every SEC West team in the adjusted per-game rankings. Their rise, however, looks tenuous after Todd Gurley returned from his suspension and promptly injured his knee during the victory over Auburn.

Marshall has vaulted back to the top of the Top 128 after knocking off Rice 41-14. Three Big Ten teams sit in the current top 10, with Michigan State taking Nebraska’s place in 10th. They are joined by the SEC as the two leagues with the most schools in the top 10, followed by the Big 12 with Baylor and TCU. Oregon, despite falling to seventh in adjusted per-game margin, remains the Pac-12’s best-positioned school in the CFP hunt. The ACC continues to be the odd man out in these rankings; Georgia Tech is now the highest-ranked team at 17th, while defending national champ Florida State is two spots back in 19th after surviving the Hurricanes. Here is the full conference distribution of the top 25:

SEC: 8

Big 12: 4

Big Ten: 4

ACC: 4

Pac-12: 2

C-USA: 2

AAC: 1

Mississippi State’s loss leaves just two unbeaten schools in the FBS, and there are now just seven teams with one loss after Duke lost to Georgia Tech, Nebraska fell at Wisconsin, and Arizona State tumbled to the Beavers in Corvallis. There are now no chances left for one-loss (or undefeated) teams to face one another in the regular season or the conference championships.

(The weekly FBS Top 128 is calculated based on a formula described in Week 1. To review the methodology behind the adjusted aggregate score, read the full explanation here. To gain a better understanding about adjustments to the formula made in Week 3, click here. Go to the next page for adjusted margin of victory per game.)